This invention relates to magnetic disk drives, and more particularly, to a head cleaner for a disk drive used with a flexible magnetic disk contained in a rigid cartridge having a Bernoulli surface against which the disk is rotated.
"Flexible" or "floppy" disks are frequently used as a magnetic storage medium because of their portability and low cost. These disks are called "floppy" because they tend to sag away from their center when not otherwise supported. The space between a magnetic disk and the transducer is critical for proper non-contact data recording and pick-up. It has been common practice in the art to flatten and stabilize the floppy disk during the read/write operation by rotating the disk at high speeds in close juxtaposition to a flat plate sometimes called a Bernoulli plate. In this way, an air bearing is formed between the plate and disk such that the gap between the record surface and the plate is held constant.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,743,989--Bauck, et al; 4,794,480--Jones, et al; 4,740,851--Jones, et al; 4,855,849--Jones, et al; and 4,901,173--Jones, et al describe such disk drives.
In both rigid and floppy disk drives the cleaning of the magnetic heads is usually accomplished by using a cleaning medium which is rotated in the same manner that the normal data disk is rotated
U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,663,686--Freeman, et al describes a head cleaning cartridge for Bernoulli type magnetic disk drives While such cartridges do effectively clean the heads, it is desirable to have a head cleaner in the drive itself so that cleaning will be accomplished routinely without the need for an operator to insert the head cleaning cartridge.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a cleaning device mounted in the drive and which can be used to clean the heads of a disk drive of the type shown in the aforementioned "Bernoulli plate" patents.
It is another object of the invention to remove the wiping requirement from the operator, who only rarely does the job and this causes drive failure.